From Data to Decision!

In my library, there is a book called Knowledge is Beautiful and in there you have pages and pages of data. All presented in a beautiful way, very nicely illustrated. Some are dashboards, some are mind-maps and some are bubble graphs. They all look pretty and some just spectacular. Still the title of the book has it all wrong, what you see on the pages are plain data – beautifully presented, no doubt – but this is not knowledge.

The distinction has to be made – data in its purest form is just that: data.

Now when you select data to work with them – that’s your information. So you start to interpret this information and by that you build knowledge. In other words, knowledge is the interpretation of the information you received from your data.

This knowledge enables you to get insights and understanding, which forms your wisdom. And out of your wisdom come your decisions. The conclusions you take from your insights.

Once you have your decision you can now get into action. Your decision in itself, doesn’t mean anything, you want to act on it, that’s what comes out of a decision. And finally your actions gives you the chance to receive feedback, in other words results.

With your results you can go back to your data, select a subset, interpret them again and eventually come to different decisions, actions and results.

So the order and sequence is:
Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom – Decision – Action and Results.